George Will: Mugging our descendants

October 27, 2012 10:01:02 PM

George Will -

The election-eve mood is tinged with sadness stemming from well-founded fear that America's new government is subverting America's old character. Barack Obama's agenda is a menu of temptations intended to change the nation 's social norms by making Americans comfortable with the degradation of democracy. This degradation consists of piling up public debt that binds unconsenting future generations to finance current consumption.

So argues Nicholas Eberstadt, an economist and demographer at American Enterprise Institute, in "A Nation of Takers: America's Entitlement Epidemic." This booklet could be Mitt Romney's closing argument.

Beginning two decades after the death of Franklin Roosevelt, who would find today's government unrecognizable, government became a geyser of entitlements. In 2010, government at all levels transferred more than $2.2 trillion in money, goods and services to recipients, $7,200 per individual, almost $29,000 per family of four. Before 1960, only in the Depression years of 1931 and 1935 did federal transfer payments exceed other federal expenditures. During most of FDR's 12 presidential years, income transfers were a third or less of federal spending. But between 1960 and 2010, entitlements exploded from 28 percent to 66 percent of federal spending. By 2010, more than 34 percent of households were receiving means-tested benefits. Republicans were more than merely complicit, says Eberstadt:

"The growth of entitlement spending over the past half-century has been distinctly greater under Republican administrations than Democratic ones. Between 1960 and 2010, the growth of entitlement spending was exponential, but in any given year, it was on the whole over 8 percent higher if the president happened to be a Republican rather than a Democrat. ... The Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and George W. Bush administrations presided over especially lavish expansions of the entitlement state."

Why, then, should we expect Romney to reverse Republican complicity? Because by embracing Paul Ryan, Romney embraced Ryan's emphasis on the entitlement state's moral as well as financial costs.

As evidence of the moral costs, Eberstadt cites the fact that means-tested entitlement recipience has not merely been destigmatized, it has been celebrated as a basic civil right. Hence the stunning growth of supposed disabilities. The normalization and then celebration of dependency help explain the "unprecedented exit from gainful work by adult men."

Since 1948, male labor force participation has plummeted from 89 percent to 73 percent. Today, 27 percent of adult men do not consider themselves part of the workforce: A large part of the jobs problem for American men today is not wanting one. Which is why labor force participation ratios for men in the prime of life are lower in America than in Europe.

One reason work now is neither a duty nor a necessity is the gaming -- defrauding, really -- of disability entitlements. In 1960, an average of 455,000 workers were receiving disability payments; in 2011, 8.6 million were, more than four times the number of persons receiving basic welfare benefits under Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Nearly half of the 8.6 million were "disabled" because of "mood disorders" or ailments of the "musculoskeletal system and the connective tissue." It is, says Eberstadt, essentially impossible to disprove a person's claim to be suffering from sad feelings or back pain.

"In 1960," Eberstadt says, "roughly 134 Americans were engaged in gainful employment for every officially disabled worker; by December 2010 there were just over 16." This, in spite of the fact that public health had improved much, and automation and the growth of the service/information economy had made work less physically demanding. Eberstadt says collecting disability is an increasingly important American "profession."

For every 100 industrial workers in December 2010, there were 73 workers receiving disability payments. Between January 2010 and December 2011, the U.S. economy created 1.73 million nonfarm jobs, but almost half as many (790,000) workers became disability recipients. This trend is not a Great Recession phenomenon: In the 15 years ending in December 2011, the United States added 8.8 million nonfarm private sector jobs and 4.1 million workers on disability rolls.

The radiating corruption of this entitlement involves the collaboration of doctors and health care professionals who certify dubious disability claims. The judicial system, too, is compromised in the process of setting disability standards that enable all this.

America's ethos once was what Eberstadt calls "optimistic Puritanism," combining an affinity for personal enterprise with a horror of dependency. Nov. 6 is a late and perhaps last chance to begin stopping the scandal of plundering our descendants' wealth to finance the demands of today's entitlement mentality.

Author and Pulitzer Prize winning columnist George Will writes a syndicated column on politics and domestic affairs. His email address is georgewill@washingtonpost.com